Every day between Christmas and New Year’s, somewhere a bowl is kicking off.

There are 32 of the things, giving ESPN something to broadcast between the end of the regular season and the long march of college basketball season. In fact, the Worldwide Leader even owns six bowls.

Somewhere, 170 travelling squad players will grab a goody bag, and two teams will leave town with fatter wallets and something else to gather dust in the trophy case for the winner.

Steve Wilson is sports editor of The Vicksburg Post. He can be reached by e-mail, or at 601-636-4545, ext.142.

There’s a Humanitarian Bowl. An Emerald Bowl, albeit with no Wizard of Oz. The Independence Bowl. The GMAC Bowl. Insight. Poinsettia. International. Meineke. Every company with more than 400 employees has its corporate logo shoehorned onto a bowl logo. Every city with more than 100,000 residents and a stadium that is not falling apart has a bowl game these days. New Orleans has two of them, both played in the Superdome.

The NCAA has been approving bowl games like mortgage companies did lenders before the housing bubble burst. Sign your name on the dotted line and you’re approved. It’s a shame that 64 of the 119 schools in the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision even earned a bowl berth. Seven of those schools squeaked into a bowl with mediocre 6-6 marks.

But before all this chaos descended, for every Cotton and Rose bowl, there were bowls that didn’t last very long. Whereas Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer had the Island of Misfit Toys, somewhere there is a graveyard of forgotten bowls.

Their names don’t exactly roll off the tongue. But they were interesting nonetheless.

In New York, some businessmen thought it’d be a great idea to play a bowl game in the dead of winter at the Polo Grounds. The name? The Gotham Bowl. Holy two-year wonder, Batman! No, Batman didn’t officiate, but he should’ve locked up the geniuses who thought it a great idea to play the 1962 edition of the game on a 14-degree day. Miami beat Nebraska 35-34 in a thriller, but it’d be the last Gotham Bowl. But that’s not the end of football in New York City in winter, as the Yankees will host a bowl on Dec. 29, 2010. Guess the lessons of history go unlearned.

The Great Lakes Bowl was a one-time flop of a game played in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1949. New Jersey hosted the Garden State Bowl for a couple of forgettable seasons in the land where some believe Jimmy Hoffa is buried. Dayton, Ohio had one year of the Aviation Bowl.

Word to the wise: a bowl game without a domed stadium in frigid climes isn’t likely going to be much of a success.

There was the Salad Bowl, a precursor to the Fiesta Bowl in Arizona. There was the Refrigerator Bowl, played in Evansville, Ind., for nine years before being put on ice.

There was the aptly named Cigar Bowl in Tampa. Southern Miss beat Havana University 55-0 in the Bacardi Bowl in Cuba in 1946, the final time college football was played in the Caribbean.

Houston seems to be the capital of failed bowls. There was the Oil Bowl, the Bluebonnet Bowl and then the Houston Bowl which became another useless domain name.com bowl before morphing into the Texas Bowl.

So mourn these bowls not. In a few decades, can you imagine an All-Papajohns.com Bowl team? I sure can’t.